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The Summit County Sheriff's Office had the case. Todd Gabler had a cane, a laptop, and different rules. By the time he was done — over a year of independent investigation, nearly 50 interviews, GPS surveillance, phone record analysis, and a multi-day search of the Richins home — Gabler had assembled the evidence that helped break open a criminal case law enforcement hadn't been able to move.
This is the complete three-part sit-down with the private investigator at the center of the Kouri Richins prosecution. Gabler walks Tony Brueski through every stage — how a civil assignment became a homicide investigation, what the phone records revealed about Kouri's relationship with the woman prosecutors say bought the fentanyl, why the police investigation stalled and what that cost the Richins family, how the defense tried to discredit him on the stand, and what the case did to a man who'd spent his entire career on the other side.
From the first phone call to the life-without-parole sentence, Gabler tells the story nobody else can tell — because nobody else was this deep inside the case.
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The evidence file in Sandra Birchmore's case has reached a tipping point, and a judge just said so in writing. In denying bail to former Stoughton officer Matthew Farwell, the court described the evidence against him as very strong, if not overwhelming. We examine what's actually in that file.
Birchmore, twenty-three and pregnant, was found dead in her Canton apartment in 2021. The state initially ruled it a suicide. Prosecutors later charged Farwell with killing her and staging the scene, alleging he acted to conceal a relationship that began when she was a teenager who met him through a police youth program.
The forensic and digital record is where this case has shifted. Prosecutors say Farwell's DNA was found on the strap of a bag they identify as the weapon, and they have called him the major contributor to that profile. They have also pointed to phone data they say reflects a continued interest in teenage girls. The defense counters that the DNA is a complex mixture that can't be cleanly attributed to anyone. Layered on top: the state has amended the death certificate, moving the manner of death from suicide to undetermined — a reversal forensic experts call extraordinarily rare.
Our guest, an attorney and legal analyst, walks through how a jury tends to weigh dueling forensic experts, what the bail ruling signals about the strength of the government's case, and why the defense's pretrial losses may be pointing toward a different strategy entirely.
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Blair's sketch showing Bridge Guy looks nothing like Allen — excluded. The expert who would have challenged the bullet science — excluded. The audio showing Allen's psychotic state when he confessed — excluded. The expert who would have called those confessions false — excluded. The ritual killing expert who could explain the crime scene — excluded. Every piece of evidence about alternative suspects connected to the victim, to pagan rituals, and to the crime scene symbolism — excluded. The phone data showing activity on Libby's phone hours after Allen allegedly left the scene — countered by a Google search the State's witness conducted during trial. The five and a half years of investigative failures — hidden behind a "fast forward." According to the defense, the trial court created a fundamentally one-sided proceeding where the prosecution could present its theory unopposed and the defense was stripped of virtually every tool to challenge it. Allen was convicted on November 11, 2024, and sentenced to 130 years. His appeal argues arbitrary rulings crippled his ability to present a complete defense. The State responds to every exclusion with two words: harmless error. This episode documents what the jury never heard, what the judge kept out, and why the defense believes this trial produced a conviction that cannot stand. Abby and Libby deserved better than a trial where the full truth was not allowed into the room.
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#Delphi #RichardAllen #DelphiMurders #RichardAllenTrial #HarmlessError #TrueCrime #HiddenKillers #WrongfulConviction #ExcludedEvidence #JusticeForAbbyAndLibby
The Seagram’s heiress who poured $100 million into NXIVM walked out of federal prison in June 2025. The campus she financed sold for $700,000. Keith Raniere’s projected release date is June 26, 2120. This episode runs the numbers on everyone.
Clare Bronfman: 81 months, handcuffed in the courtroom on the spot, the only co-defendant who never cooperated. Allison Mack: cooperated, served two years of a three-year sentence, released 2023. Nancy Salzman: cooperated, served three and a half years, released 2024. Lauren Salzman: testified against Raniere at trial, received probation only. Kathy Russell: two years probation. Those who turned on Raniere walked free or served minimal time. The one who stood by him served the longest sentence and was denied early release.
A seventy-plaintiff federal RICO lawsuit remains active against Clare Bronfman, Sara Bronfman — who left the U.S. in 2018 and lives abroad — and Danielle Roberts. Allison Mack was dismissed from the case. More than thirty original plaintiffs withdrew.
Raniere’s remaining legal instruments: a second Supreme Court cert petition on the evidence-tampering claim, and a habeas petition raising ineffective-counsel arguments, currently on hold. The Supreme Court grants roughly one percent of cert petitions. The Second Circuit called the evidence against him a mountain. He is sixty-five at USP Tucson.
The final episode of a four-part Hidden Killers investigation into NXIVM and Keith Raniere.
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For more than a decade, the Dan Markel case has produced conviction after conviction. What it has not produced is a charge against the two people prosecutors have repeatedly named as part of the conspiracy: Wendi Adelson and her father, Harvey. We dig into why.
Markel, an FSU law professor, was shot in his Tallahassee garage in 2014 amid a bitter post-divorce battle with Wendi over their two sons and her thwarted attempt to relocate to South Florida. The state's theory has always been that the family wanted that move badly enough to kill for it. Two hitmen, a go-between, Wendi's brother Charlie, and her mother Donna have all been convicted.
The evidentiary record around the two who remain uncharged is its own story. Wendi has testified across multiple trials, each time under limited immunity — protection that evaporates only if she lied under oath. Harvey has never taken the stand, but cell records introduced at trial reportedly showed contact between a phone connected to him and a phone tied to one of the hitmen, and he was beside Donna at the airport with one-way tickets to a non-extradition country when she was arrested.
After Donna's conviction, the State Attorney signaled decisions within weeks. Months on, nothing has surfaced. Our guest — a defense attorney and former prosecutor — walks through what that delay typically means, how a perjury theory against an immunized witness would actually have to be proven, and whether the evidence on Harvey ever crossed the threshold prosecutors said it hadn't.
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The defendant in Anna Kepner's death has now been indicted as an adult — and that single procedural shift was supposed to change everything about whether he stays free before trial. Instead, a federal judge heard the prosecution's case for detention and walked away without a ruling.
Here's what the record shows. Anna, eighteen, was traveling with her blended family aboard the Carnival Horizon when she was found dead in a shared room, her body concealed. The case moved to federal court because the death occurred in international waters. After a grand jury indicted the sixteen-year-old as an adult, prosecutors moved to revoke his release and hold him until trial, arguing the seriousness of the charges alone makes him a danger.
The judge didn't disagree on the merits. He acknowledged on the record that a twenty-year-old facing identical allegations would likely be detained. What he kept circling back to was age — and the logistics of where this defendant would be held if he ordered detention. He paused the hearing specifically to consult with the U.S. Marshals about housing the teen in central Florida, closer to family, rather than in the Miami area where the trial sits.
That's the thread we pull on here: the conditions of release, the prosecution's argument that compliance means little when the defendant didn't even know charges were coming, and the question of whether the judge is quietly building toward detention — or genuinely undecided about locking him up at all.
A criminal defense attorney joins us to read the room inside that courtroom and explain what the next ruling likely turns on.
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Mackenzie Shirilla's texts were controlling. Her threats were documented. Her TikTok persona screamed narcissism. Everything about her personality made people want to believe she was capable of murder. But since when does being a difficult person prove premeditated intent beyond a reasonable doubt?
In the early morning of July 31st, 2022, Shirilla drove her car into a brick building in Strongsville, Ohio at close to a hundred miles per hour, killing her boyfriend Dominic Russo, twenty, and their friend Davion Flanagan, nineteen. Prosecutors pulled the ugliest messages from ninety-three thousand texts, pointed to a prior incident where she reportedly threatened to crash her car during an argument, and argued the crash was a calculated act to end a relationship she couldn't control. A judge — no jury — convicted her and called her "hell on wheels."
But there's a difference between being volatile and being a calculated killer. And the evidence in this case doesn't land as cleanly on one side as the conviction suggests. Surveillance footage shows the car accelerating, but it can't show what was happening in the driver's mind. Black box data proves no braking — but that's also consistent with loss of consciousness. A medical condition that could explain the crash was raised at trial but never properly presented. The expert who later examined her records and found evidence consistent with a seizure was never heard by the court because her post-conviction petition arrived one day too late.
This episode separates what we know from what we assume. It examines how personality gets treated as evidence, how grief shapes the stories families tell themselves, and what happens when the legal system forecloses on a question it never actually answered. Mackenzie Shirilla is serving fifteen years to life. Maybe the sentence fits. But is it for the right reasons? That's the question this episode sits with — and leaves with you.
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On the surface, these three cases share nothing. Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance from her Tucson home is an unsolved kidnapping with DNA at the FBI lab and more than fifty thousand tips under review. The Anna Kepner case is a federal murder prosecution stemming from a death on a Carnival cruise ship, with the accused — her sixteen-year-old stepbrother Timothy Hudson — pleading not guilty and a family tearing itself apart in custody filings. The D4VD case is a death-eligible murder charge in Los Angeles County, with prosecutors alleging the musician killed fourteen-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez to protect his career. Burke has pleaded not guilty. But psychotherapist Shavaun Scott, with more than thirty years in forensic mental health, finds the same failure underneath all three. In the Guthrie case, she traces what months of post-crime silence and the looming threat of genetic genealogy do to a perpetrator’s mind. In the Kepner case, she dissects a family structure where a biological mother allegedly chose self-preservation over her own child, leaving every minor in the household exposed. In the D4VD case, she follows a developmental trajectory from religious restriction through unrestricted digital immersion to an industry that allegedly handed a teenager fame and wealth with no one positioned to provide accountability. The connecting thread is systems — families, communities, institutions, industries — that were supposed to catch what was wrong before it became irreversible. Scott examines why they allegedly didn’t and what that means for how we understand each of these cases.
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Todd Gabler never met Eric Richins. But he might know him better than almost anyone outside the family. Over the course of a year-long investigation, Gabler went through Eric's phone records, walked through his home, interviewed dozens of people who knew him, and pieced together the reality of a marriage and a life that ended in a way nobody should have to die.
That kind of immersion changes an investigator. Especially one who's spent 34 years on the defense side — the side that challenges, pokes holes, fights for the accused. For the first time in his career, Gabler's evidence became the prosecution's case. And when the jury convicted Kouri Richins on all counts in under three hours, he was sitting in a seat he'd never occupied before.
In Part 3, Gabler tells Tony what Eric Richins became to him through the investigation, what it was like to testify six weeks after surgery because he refused to miss his day in court, and whether 34 years of doing this work prepared him for what this particular case did to him as a person.
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Prosecutors allege David Anthony Burke — the musician known as D4VD — killed fourteen-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez and attempted to conceal the evidence for months. They’ve filed special circumstance allegations including murder for financial gain. Burke has pleaded not guilty. But the evidentiary question of what allegedly happened leads to a deeper one — what allegedly created the conditions for it to happen? Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott joins Hidden Killers to trace the psychological trajectory that reportedly brought Burke from a strictly religious Houston household to a death-eligible murder charge in Los Angeles. Burke was homeschooled by his mother in a home where the only permitted music was gospel until age thirteen. She reportedly suggested he start making music. She was his teacher, his social structure, his entire framework. Then the internet provided unrestricted access to a world he had no preparation for. By seventeen, he was signed to major labels, touring internationally, surrounded by an inner circle that consisted entirely of people whose livelihoods allegedly depended on his continued output. Scott examines what happens when religious restriction gives way to digital immersion without any intermediary to help a developing mind process the transition. She addresses the psychological impact of sudden fame and wealth on a teenager with no peer foundation, and she dissects the specific danger of an inner circle where every person allegedly benefits from you and no person is positioned to tell you no. The question isn’t just what Burke allegedly did. It’s who was supposed to be watching.
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